PATERSON — In an effort to avoid laying off teachers, the city school district is considering taking out a $10 million loan using student textbooks as collateral.

The proposed loan is part of the district’s plan for closing an impending $33 million gap in the 2018-19 budget.

But several Board of Education members said they are not comfortable with using a one-time fiscal maneuver that would create an even larger budget gap in subsequent years. Board members compared the proposal to the property sales that Paterson’s municipal government used to balance its budget a decade ago, a practice that eventually resulted in a 29 percent tax increase and 400 layoffs in 2011 after officials ran out of land to sell.

“It’s not a good practice to borrow money to support day-to-day operations,” said Flavio Rivera, chairman of the school board’s finance committee. “It should only be looked at as a last resort.”

Other school board members used analogies to question the wisdom of the plan.

“It’s like using a Band-Aid on a bullet wound,” said Kenneth Simmons.

“It’s like using gum to patch up a crack on the side of a ship,” said Manny Martinez.

With about 28,000 students and about 4,000 employees, Paterson Public Schools has a $550 million budget for the current academic year.

Budget problems have forced the district to lay off more than 500 employees — the majority of them teachers — during the past three years. The district initially said it faced a $78 million budget gap for 2018-19, but officials said they have reduced that number to $33 million without proposed layoffs or service cuts.

The school board is scheduled to vote on the textbook loan proposal on Monday night.

A preliminary report on the plan shows the district would repay the $10 million over the next five years, with interest costing about $925,000 over that time.

Board members said they would want to know how the district planned to cover the gap in subsequent years before they voted on the loan. The district’s business administrator, Richard Matthews, said he has been in discussions with the New Jersey Schools Insurance Group “to provide us with huge savings through the bundling of services.”

A Leonia-based company, Educational Funding Sources, is conducting an inventory to calculate the value of the textbooks that the district owns, Matthews said. That inventory also will cover some electronic devices, he said.

The district did not issue a request for proposals in hiring Educational Funding Sources as its consultants on the initiative. That’s a common practice when public entities hire consultants, but it is not required under the law, officials said.

Matthews said he sought price quotes from two other firms that handle such work, but that they did not respond. Educational Funding Sources is headed by Maureen Davis, the daughter of the late executive county superintendent of schools, Robert Davis, who died this year.

Education Funding Sources would be paid fees amounting to 1 percent of the total transaction, Matthews said. That would be about $100,000 if the district borrows the $10 million.